So, can someone summarize the state of forced subtitles?

[Romansh]

The new star wars movies.

Not on my discs (UK Blu-ray release). The forced subtitles are in their own dedicated track, but they are flagged as forced (at least according to BDSup2Sub).

The LOTR EE Blu-ray is an example, however; while the US release has the forced subtitles burned-in, some other releases (for the Asian market) have the subtitles in their own track, and they are NOT flagged as forced (still according to BDSup2Sub).

[voip-ninja]

That is interesting and extremely odd. Kill Bill has a separate sub track for the Japanese that is spoken throughout, but it is definitely a forced track. So, basically what is going on with Star Wars, is that once you start playback it just selects that alien language track to display, vs. using the forced attribute. Very interesting (bizarre) way of choosing to do things, but it seems to me that more and more of the things studios do with forced subtitles are subtle little ploys to deter piracy and/or make their distribution costs lower.

I simply used BDSUP2SUB to look at the dozen or so "english" sub tracks generated for each of the Star Wars movies with MakeMKV, figured out which one was "alien dialogue" and then just marked that track forced in MKVMerge.

As I said a couple of posts ago, what Star Wars does is the exception. The overwhelming majority of discs with forced subs just have a single forced sub track or individual forced elements within a given language track, so there's no reason that if you told MakeMKV that your language is "english" that it could not figure all of this out for you, AND mark the resulting forced subs (whether in a separate track or part of a larger one) as forced automatically so you did not have to go back into MKVMerge.

[Chetwood]

If you want the tracks to be forced then you mark them forced in mkvmerge and remux....no way around this for know as far as I can tell.

You can change track flags like default and forced with MMGs header editor so no remuxing is necessary. Still it would be nice to be able to set proper flags from within MakeMKV.

BTW, the German version of the LOTR BD also has separate tracks for Elvish being flagged as forced.

[kcsims]

I'm having similar problems as many on this too. I used makemkv to rip just the m2ts file using "Backup" I then just use tsMuxer to combine all the files into 1 .m2ts if necessary. The problem I have is that hard subs (those not burned into the image) have to be selected manually from whichever player I use (PC, Boxee, etc.) Is there any way to edit the m2ts or tell makemkv to make a certain sub track on (forced) by default?

Thanks.